Canada’s obesity strategy gets failing grade

The Great White North ranks third from the bottom in rankings of “Activity Inequality” by a group of researchers who looked at smartphone data to see how much walking people do in 111 countries and tracked their steps over an average of 95 days.

Activity inequality

Activity inequality is a measure that looks at the gap between people who are “activity rich,” or who walk a lot, and the “activity poor,” who don’t.

They found that countries with high levels of activity inequality corresponded with high obesity rates.

“If you think about some people in a country as ‘activity rich’ and others as ‘activity poor,’ the size of the gap between them is a strong indicator of obesity levels in that society,” Scott Delp, a bioengineer who helped lead the research, said in a news release.

This image maps out activity inequality scores for 46 countries where physical activity was distributed more equally. The lighter countries ranked higher on the list, the darker ones ranked lower:

This map shows the activity inequality scores for 46 countries, as measured by researchers at Stanford.

Infogram/Global News

Canada ranked third from the bottom of a list of 46 countries where activity was spread more equally among the population, with an activity inequality score of 30.3.

Only Australia (30.4) and Saudi Arabia (32.5) ranked lower.

Canada’s placement, as well as that of other countries, suggests a correlation with obesity rates.